London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. In the midst of it all is the Giant, O'Brien, a freak of nature, a man of song and story who trusts in myths, fairies, miracles, and little people. He has come from Ireland to exhibit his size for money. O'Brien's opposite is a man of science, the famed anatomist John Hunter, who lusts after the Giant's corpse as a medical curiosity, a boon to the advancement of scientific knowledge. In her acclaimed novel, two-time Man Booker Prize winning author Hilary Mantel tells of the fated convergence of Ireland and England. As belief wrestles knowledge and science wrestles song, so The Giant, O'Brien calls to us from a fork in the road as a tale of time, and a timeless tale.
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" The author hits you over the head with how horrible life was; the characters, surrounded by death and decay, are mostly either witless fools or people who take advantage of witless fools; she delights in rubbing our noses in the smells of sickness and death. "
— Hummingbird, 9/18/2017Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) was a #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time winner of the Booker Prize for her bestselling novels, Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won critical acclaim around the globe. She wrote more than a dozen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving Up the Ghost.
Patrick Moy is an Irish actor best known for his roles in The Daisy Chain, The Meeting, and The Big Bow Wow. Born and raised in Dublin, he attended medical school for three years before moving to London to train as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.